User Interviews - Requirements Gathering

Interviewed 4 franchise owners and obtained the following data.
Quantitative: Current payment tracking methods kept in excel spreadsheets, 3rd party accounting software, and electronic payment applications.
Qualitative: Users frustrations on the shortcomings of their existing systems and what they actually want out of a tracking system.

Crude "High-Fidelity" Mockup

After analyzing the interview results, the product manager and I compiled a list of features we believed that would benefit the user. However, in order to receive the greenlight from our internal stakeholders to allocate more resources towards this project, I designed a quick mockup that contained more details than a lo-fidelity mockup in order to help them envision the potential of this system. It would have been hard to convey the features with just wireframes.

Group User Feedback - Powerpoint Mockup Presentation

After given the approval to go forward with the project, I further refined the mockup's features and layout because we were given the opportunity to present this new software concept to a larger audience. The product owner and I presented three Canadian cities consisting of 25-30 franchisees at each location. This gave us the opportunity to see how this system might be received by franchisees and gathered numerous useful feedback and requests.

Newly added "Business Requirements" = Major Design Overhaul

After returning from Canada with our gathered user research findings we were presented with additional business requirements from our finance department which required us to go back to the drawing board to accomodate this new list of requirements.This was a challenge I had not accounted for and it has taught me to be flexible to adapt to evolving requirements. As a result this was the introduction of 2 modes (Simple & Advanced) and the concept being able to group students into "Customers". Eventhough this revison a major design overhaul I was able to finalize the features and layout.

Wireframing

Rather than creating mockups we made wireframes to quickly produce lots of screens. We provided these to our developers so they can use it as a blueprint.

User Navigation - Paper Prototyping

Eventhough I created a general navigation map of the major screens, I printed every possible screen wireframe and started organizing it on a whiteboard. This helped me see potential holes in navigation and used post-its to organize and point out places that needed attention.

Final Software Product - Overcoming System Limitations

During the development and piloting phase there were many design changes that needed to be made due to system limitations. Some examples were speed issues when loading the data since our software works both in an online and offline environment. Some data needed to be omitted/condensed to allow performance optimization. After more than a year we were able to essentially release 6 iterations of the Tuition Tracker system.